No Man’s Land

Now in paperback, a mesmerizing novel about a tragic love triangle between three characters whose destinies have been inextricably linked by war, from Vietnam's acclaimed writer and famous dissident

No Man's Land is set in a hamlet in the countryside of central Vietnam immediately following the end of the war in 1975. The novel's plot is set in motion when a young woman, happily married to a successful farmer, comes home one day to find a throng of villagers assembled around her gate. She learns that her first husband, who reportedly died as a martyr and war hero many years back, is in fact alive and has returned to claim her.

Faced with the immense pressure of the community and the Party authorities, who forced her marriage to the soldier on the day he was to leave for the front, she dutifully agrees to leave her second husband and their son to live in a squalid shack with the veteran. This tragic twist of fate gives the novel a powerful narrative drive that makes it Huong's most accomplished work to date.

Duong Thu Huong was born in Vietnam in 1947. At the age of twenty, she led a Communist Youth Brigade sent to the front during the Vietnam War. Of the volunteer group of forty, she was one of only three survivors. A vocal advocate of human rights and democratic reform, Huong was expelled from the Communist Party in 1990 before she was arrested and imprisoned without trial. Though her novels are banned in Vietnam, where she continues to live in internal exile, she remains one of the most popular and controversial writers for Vietnamese readers both at home and abroad.

Translators Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong live in Paris. They have also translated Duong Thu Huong’s Paradise of the Blind (1993), Novel Without a Name (1995), Memories of a Pure Spring (2000), and Beyond Illusions (2002).